Women's Rights In Bolivia-Not the Best

BOLIVIA

Backsliding

When, at 16 years old, Brisa De Angulo pressed charges against a relative who she claimed raped her a year before, she faced an uphill battle in her native Bolivia.

“My house was set on fire twice, I was almost run over by a car several times, I was threatened with being killed several times, my house was stoned,” she told the Guardian.

De Angulo’s case was referred to a court that handled disputes over livestock and agriculture, an insult. Her alleged assailant fled the country, eluding justice.

Now 32, she runs an advocacy group that helps prosecute sexual assault cases. She’s also campaigning to change Bolivian laws that allow lighter punishments for raping teens aged 14 to 18, versus younger minors.

Despite De Angulo’s successes, however, women’s rights in Bolivia are arguably slipping backward.

In 2010, the South American country passed a law to ensure that more women served in government, leading to a majority femaleparliament since 2014 and huge gains for female officials in local governments.

But as the North American Congress on Latin America Report on the Americas, a New York University-based magazine, recently reported, female leaders are facing serious troubles in Bolivia.

“Women enter a patriarchal and sexist system that generates mechanisms of contention, exclusion, violence, and political harassment,” said Katia Uriona, the country’s top election official. “Previously there were no women in politics.”

Bertha Quispe, the mayor of a small town in the Bolivian Altiplano, couldn’t enter her office for four months while her political opponents blockaded the town hall in a disagreement over her redrawing of municipal boundaries, for example. By comparison, the Occupy Wall Street protesters camped out in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park for two months in 2011 before being evicted.

Women politicians aren’t the only ones facing a retrenchment in public life in Bolivia.

President Evo Morales entered office 12 years ago as the first indigenous person to lead the country. Constitutional term limits adopted in 2009 barred him from running again in 2019. Voters rejected changing the rule in a referendum, but Morales pursued a court case and got the rule thrown out. He plans to seek a fourth term in voting scheduled for October.

Indigenous groups are especially upset, wrote Reuters. They initially welcomed Morales’ rule. As he has spent more and more time in office, though, the president has pushed for development in protected areas and flouted traditions of power-sharing among leaders.

Some fear Morales could be setting the stage for Bolivia to resemble Venezuela or Nicaragua, where autocratic rule has led to privation and civil unrest, the New York Times reported.

Perhaps that’s hyperbole. But many Bolivians don’t want to take chances.